Today, the SPOT Media Platform simply has a configuration parameter specifying the maximum number of VoIP full duplex channels to be supported on the server, although it is constrained by the physical memory and compute capacity on the host.

We recommend the following hardware minimums for general VoiceXML applications:
• 3 MB RAM per bearer channel, with a 512 MB RAM minimumSPOT Media Platform System Overview
• For 32 bit systems, 13 MHz per channel, 2.5 GHz minimum, 1400 channels maximum, 200 CPS maximum
• For 64 bit systems, 19 MHz per channel, 2.5 GHz minimum, 1000 channels maximum, 200 CPS maximum

The total computational capacity of a server with two dual-core 2.4GHz CPUs is: 2 (CPUs) x 2 (cores each) x 2.4GHz (clock speed) = 9.6 GHz. To calculate the number of channels, 9600 divide by 13 is about 738, so as long as you had 738 x 3 MB of RAM (about 2.5GB) you could expect to run close to 738 channels of VoIP.

The above “rule-of-thumb” calculations are based on an internal “VoIP Ultimate Load Test” voice application. This application is characterized as an inbound/outbound dialer with playback, sending/ detecting DTMF (RFC 2833), grammar matching, and a handful of web requests. Also built in to the above recommendations is maintaining about 40% head room on total compute capacity – that is, maintaining about 40% CPU idle time.

It also holds true for a “whisper” application that simply answers a call, plays a 4 second prompt, and hangs up. This application is typical of a carrier infrastructure application used to thank a customer for using their service, and is a stress test on call set up/tear down.

More or less hardware resource may be required depending on the actual application size and complexity and whatever other processing may be going on with the data solicited from a caller. Other factors that will impact calls per second are:
• Number of documents (CCXML/VoiceXML) in the call flow
• Fetching documents from a web server rather than from the host file system
• Using HTTPS instead of HTTP
• Fetching prompts/audio files from a server rather than from a local file system
• Using dynamically generated documents, rather than fixed documents with parameters
• Size of the VoiceXML/CCMXL documents
• Use of the <subdialog> tag in documents, and depth of nested sub-dialog calls.

Now, given that “the average number of channels in use” = “calls per second” x “average call duration” , we can use the above to infer:
• For given voice application characteristics (call rate, average duration), one determines the number of channels needed, and using the capacity recommendations above, one can compute hardware requirements (how big a server, or how many servers of a given size)
• Given the average call duration for an application and a server’s channel capacity, one can compute the call rate a given server can handle.

For evaluating two IVRs doing the same application, CPS provides an excellent performance comparison metric:
• assuming they are each driven to a maximum call rate while holding comparable processor busy, and maximum channel capacity hasn’t been reached on either, the one with the higher CPS is clearly yielding higher performance.
• holding both at the same call rate, the one with lower hardware requirement (processing capacity) while maintaining equal processor idle status is yielding higher performance

Note that doubling the number of cores in a server does not really double its capacity. Rather, experience says that 2 times cores = 1.85 x capacity, which can be neglected for up 4 cores as there’s sufficient slop in the general recommendations above.SPOT Media Platform System Overview

Finally, these recommendations assume we have reached equilibrium in the application; when an application is first begun on an IVR, there is a start-up cost until document and web page caching have reached a steady state.

In our example we are keeping it simple. We will use the “Prompt” node to ask for some digits, and then playback those digits with another node.

Step 1 — Add a prompt node to the canvas. Click on the canvas and select the prompt node. The prompt node has a great deal of options, but it’s two functions are playing messages and collecting input.

In the prompt tab select add text-to-speech and enter.
Please enter some digits followed by the pound key.

Step 2 — In the collect tab select “Digits” in the Type field.  You will also need to set the max length.  There are values that you can also specify under the “DTMF Properties” but in our example we will leave them blank.  Under The “Assign Variables” we will assign this to the name input.  This is important because we will need this name later for playback.

Step 3 — Add another “Prompt” node to the canvas for playback.  Click on Add text-to-speech.  All input variables are objects with properties.  The property we are concerned with is the interpretation property.  To use the value in this or other portions of your application the variable would look like @=input.interpretation@.  To make things easier wil will autofill the properties when you press “.”.

You entered @=input.interpretation@  thank you good bye.

Step 4.  Deploy and Test

Click on Menu, Deploy, and select the number to deploy to.

Thanks for checking out our FAQ, you can see more FAQ’s at www.iivip.com/faq

Our example sends a request and plays back the result for errors and for valid requests.  We’ve included a echo server that you are free to use for testing.

Add a http request node to your graph.

Open the http request node and under the details tab we’ll setup our request information.

URL: We’ve created an echo server (example) that accepts request values and echos them back as JSON.
http://iivip.com/sandbox/echo.php

Body: The body uses a JSON formated object and converts these to request parameters.
{
"x":"1",
"y":"2"
}

Header: Under the header tab make sure you use the following values or this will not work.

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: application/json

Response: On the response tab you need to name your return variables. The system will auto assign variable names. I change mine to response for the response body, and status for the status code.

Make sure you add the the status code 200 for a successful response.

To test the result I’ve added two prompt nodes. One called “Success” which takes the 200 path and plays the result variable. The other is called “Error” and plays back the status code.

On the succes node we play back the response variable using text-to-speech.
Your http request was successful. The value x is equal to @=response.x@, Good Job!
Using the above example the response from echo.php is {“x”:”1″,”y”:”2″} and you should hear

Your http request was successful. The value x is equal to 1, Good Job!

echo.php

<?php
header('Content-type: application/json'); echo json_encode($_REQUEST);
?>


 Inbound Services

Media platforms are perfect for telco environments, automated customer service, and automated bill pay, and can be used to create services that have historically been closed systems, such as voice mail and auto attendant.  Lately they have grown in popularity by allowing customers, such as Mortech, to closely integrate their telco environments with their CRM systems.  This provides them end-to-end visibility and monitoring of their call center customers.  The SPOT Media Platform has enabled customers like Mortech to stream and record live calls at a touch of a button for the fraction of the cost of an embedded ACD.

 Outbound Services

Historically, most people think of media platforms and only see the traditional inbound press 1, press 2 IVR applications.  Outbound services are a proactive way to reach your customers.  Whether it’s for individual appointment notifications, town hall meetings, or school closings, a media platform should have multiple ways for you to manage and start your outbound campaigns.

 Extending Your Media Platform

A media platform should allow you to manage and develop applications easily.  Everyone has different definitions of easy.  For me, I enjoy working in SPOT’s service creation environment. I also have a high comfort level for the api’s available to me.  VXML and CCXML are the de facto standard and are popular because they allow for portability.

Song: “Happy Birthday — The Ting Tings”  http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/the-ting-tings/id272194824

For 30 years Interact has been working to solve the communication needs of our customers.  We have done this with a yes-we-can attitude and a smile on our face.  The work is enjoyable but we’ve made sure to stop and have some fun along the way.

In 1981  Interact’s founder, Greg Gissler, was 31.  Lynn McKee, Interact’s president was 32.  Here are some of the favorite movies and music from that year.

Top Movies of 1981 (Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_film)

Academy Awards:

Best Picture: Chariots of Fire - Enigma, The Ladd Company/Warner Bros.

Best Director: Warren Beatty - Reds

Best Actor: Henry Fonda - On Golden Pond

Best Actress: Katharine Hepburn - On Golden Pond

Best Supporting Actor: John Gielgud - Arthur

Best Supporting Actress: Maureen Stapleton - Reds

Best Foreign Language Film: Mephisto, directed by Istvan Szabo, Hungary

Number 1 Singles in Music (Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_music)

“(Just Like) Starting Over” – John Lennon (4 weeks)
“The Tide Is High” – Blondie (1)
“Celebration” – Kool & the Gang (2)
“9 to 5” – Dolly Parton (2)
“I Love a Rainy Night” – Eddie Rabbitt (2)
“Keep on Loving You” - REO Speedwagon (1)
“Rapture” – Blondie (2)
“Kiss On My List” – Daryl Hall & John Oates (3)
“Morning Train (9 to 5)” – Sheena Easton (2)
“Bette Davis Eyes” – Kim Carnes (9)
“Stars on 45 Medley” – Stars On 45 (1)
“The One That You Love” – Air Supply (1)
“Jessie’s Girl” – Rick Springfield (2)
“Endless Love” – Diana Ross & Lionel Richie (9)
“Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” – Christopher Cross (3)
“Private Eyes” – Daryl Hall & John Oates (2)
“Physical” – Olivia Newton-John (6)

Interact’s Intelligent Peripheral is unique however, in that it is able to utilize Interact’s outstanding IVR functionality while simultaneously maintaining a fully operable IP presence.  Our Intelligent Peripheral (or Specialized Resource Function, SRF), along with our Media Resource Function (MRF) and IP Media Server, are all located within the same environment that is geared toward elasticity and that encourages operator independence.

For service providers, our Media Platform includes Specialized Resource Function (SRF), and Media Resource Function (MRF) together within the same environment.  Available in a software only model, or a traditional SS7 model, our software only solution can scale based on an operator’s usage, so you pay for only what you use.  Interact understand that the needs of an Intelligent Peripheral can vary greatly based on marketing promotions, and changes to user experience, therefore we have designed a licensing package that allows you to add and remove lines on demand.

Interact was able the leverage the knowledge of virtualization it gained in 2011 and move head first into cloud communications.  With successful deployments into Amazon, Softlayer, and Rackspace we are well positioned to help our customers move into true cloud enabled environment.

What are your plans for 2012?

We are focused on our customer base now more than ever.  Our new Service Creation Tool will allow customers to greatly improve their time to market.  Improved web hooks, tighter ASR and TTS integration, with the addition of AMD(Answering Machine Detection) will make hosting applications even easier.  Not moving too far away from our core our SPOT Media Platform will still support VXML and CCXML standards.

Knowing the importance of our customers desire for reduced start-up costs, coupled with the requirement for capital preservation we are striving to address our customers at whatever stage they may be in.  Providing our customers a path from our cloud to their cloud is one way we are addressing this.

Can you elaborate on some of challenges you forsee for you and your clients in 2012?

Our clients will need to be able to react even quicker to the the ever changing market demands.  They will need applications that can be quickly prototyped, and easily be brought to market.  This in addition to their ability to scale quickly will be driving factors in their ability for them to succeed in the the market.

What are your predictions for 2012 for the IVR system market?

IVR’s in the cloud will become the norm and not the exception.

Were there any specific advancement technologically that you were really able to capitalize on in 2011?

We were able to leverage our knowledge of communications and virtualization to move into the cloud communications arena.  This along with greater proliferation of quality VoIP providers has set the stage for expanded growth in the cloud communications space.

Over the past year we have seen a cosmic shift in the way our customers are growing and managing their businesses.  With the advent of cloud platforms such as Amazon, Softlayer, and Rackspace our customers are able to host their communications applications and scale to 1,000′s of ports in minutes.

Our SPOT SIP engine inherently allows providers to download and run their CCXML and VXML on cloud instances.  Now we have released new licensing that allows for customers to grow dynamically and pay for only what they use.

Per minute pricing as low as .01 / minute

- OR -

Per port pricing as low as $5 / port / month

To learn more, and to see if elastic pricing is a fit contact sales at yeswecan@iivip.com

Interact Inc. certainly thinks so, that’s why we’ve developed “Joined Account” rating for our Invigorate Real-Time Billing and Rating platform. With Interact’s “Joined Account” rating, mobile operators can rate multiple family accounts, business accounts, and data sharing devices so they’re all under one “master account” and the consumer receives one bill at the end of the month. As a consumer this takes the “chore” out of bill paying, and as a mobile operator, helps create a better subscriber-operator bond.